Articles

Standing Out in the Crowd - New Approaches to Search Engine Marketing

As seen in Greater Charlotte Biz Magazine, bizXperts, October-2009
Author: William H. (Kip) Cozart, III, CEO, President, Co-Founder
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Last year, Google.com announced that it had traced links to over 1 trillion unique, active web pages (URLs).

Today, more and more customers rely on the Internet as their first (and sometimes only) source to locate and select which company gets their business. With ever increasing competition, it has never been more important (and more difficult) to uniquely position and promote your website online so that customers and prospects alike will find and connect to your business quickly and easily.

If your website is getting lost in the shuffle, perhaps it is time to update your approach. Think “Smart Search.”

Start with a plan…Before composing your web content, make sure that you have first clearly defined your “5-Ws.” What are you really selling or promoting? Who is your target audience and what attracts them? Where are your markets located? When are customers most likely to purchase your services? Why should someone buy specifically from you? Answers to these fundamental questions will help identify the online information that is most needed, determine page structure and titles, guide navigation decisions, highlight critical search phrasing (keywords) to represent your services, and suggest what descriptive text will best convey the most compelling story.

There are no short-cuts…Establishing productive and sustained search engine rankings is directly tied to the amount of precise, relevant, consistent and desired content that is presented and maintained within your website. Questionable practices involving the use of unrelated “meta tags,” excessively duplicated content, links from unrelated 3rd party websites, and overly frequent site submission, rarely improve and often damage search engine performance. Even with the purchase of pay-per-click advertising, which can temporarily push website links near the top of designated search results pages, ads must accurately reference your true website content in order to really generate a meaningful customer sales and marketing response.

Page-by-page promotion…For best results, every page within your website should be individually optimized for search engine promotion, complete with topic-specific page titles, detailed and germane text, matching keyword meta tags, supportive links and other relevant content. In other words, if the information is important enough to be posted on a page in the first place, it should also be specifically optimized for search engine inclusion in its own right. Duplicate sets of generic page titles and meta tags that are simply copied throughout the entire website are ineffective.

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About the author:

As one of the region’s earliest pioneers in the field of online communications, Kip Cozart, along with CC Communications owner/partners Russ Husky and Loretta Cozart, has consulted with hundreds of businesses and organizations to enhance and produce effective web, email, multimedia marketing initiatives and business process improvements for more than fourteen years. Contact kcozart@cccommunications.com or call CC Communications at 704-543-1171.